MAIL COMMENT: Ministers put cronies before their voters

Two points can be made with certainty about the Government’s plans to simplify and relax planning laws.

One is that those who stand to gain most are get-rich-quick developers, who include some of the Conservative Party’s most generous donors.

The other is that the biggest losers will be lovers of England’s countryside, among whom are numbered many of the Tories’ most loyal traditional supporters.

Protecting the countryside: Simpified and relaxed planning laws will severely jeapordise what remains of our green and pleasant lands

Inevitably, therefore, many will detect a noxious whiff of corruption and betrayal, which will be dispelled only if ministers can convince the public that these reforms are essential to the nation’s welfare and prosperity.

But are they? Or are they just another sign that this Government, like the last, is prepared to brush voters aside in its eagerness to please rich friends?

Yes, everyone understands the urgent need for new housing to accommodate our ballooning population, which is set to grow at the rate of a city the size of Leeds every year for the next decade (though to state the obvious, this need would be far less pressing if only the Tories honoured their pledge to control immigration).

Rising population: Everyone understands the pressures for the creation of urgent new housing

The Mail also acknowledges that our current planning regulations – all 1,300 pages of them – are a quagmire in which even the most beneficial developments have become bogged down for years.

Indeed, slimming down the guidelines to 50 pages is welcome in principle – as are ministers’ assurances that the new rules will not override protections for the green belt and other designated areas.

But no amount of ministerial bluster can disguise the acute threat to the countryside – a heritage as precious as our language – contained in the order that there must be a ‘presumption in favour of sustainable development’.

On any reading of that mealy-mouthed word ‘sustainable’, this is a charter for developers to trample on residents’ passionate feelings (so much for Tory localism!) and concrete over fields – especially in the overcrowded south east.

Yet the damning truth is that any such desecration is utterly unnecessary.

For all over the country, there are vast swathes of derelict brownfield land, where houses, shops and factories could be built without damage to anyone’s quality of life.

Indeed, the planning review offered a chance for the Tories to regenerate rundown areas, by offering incentives to attract staff and businesses and penalties for holding on to unused wasteland.

Instead, they have bowed to the developers’ demands to build where the easy money can be made – leaving true Conservatives wondering once again why they bothered to vote.

This betrayal – and that whiff of corruption – will not soon be forgotten.

Buying Ed’s silence

By appearing to encourage panic-buying of petrol, the Coalition is playing a high stakes (and arguably irresponsible) game in its efforts to frustrate the tanker drivers’ strike, which could close nearly 8,000 filling stations and threatens to wreck the Easter break for families.

But ministers are right about one thing: it is entirely unacceptable that the whole country should be held to ransom by the mere 1,001 well-paid Unite members who voted for the walkout – fewer than half the drivers balloted.